Daily Archives: June 6, 2017

A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship passes 253 miles above the Nile River early Monday as it closed in on the International Space Station.

NASA

A refurbished SpaceX Dragon cargo ship loaded with 6,000 pounds of supplies and equipment was captured by astronauts operating the International Space Station's robot arm Monday to wrap up a two-day rendezvous.

The Dragon, making its second flight to the station -- a first for SpaceX -- pulled up to within about 30 feet of the station and then stood by while astronaut Jack Fischer, operating the robot arm from inside the multi-window cupola work station, locked onto a grapple fixture at 9:52 a.m. EDT (GMT-4).

"We want to thank the entire team on the ground that made this possible," Fischer said. "These people have supplied us with a vast amount of science and supplies."

Fischer noted that the Dragon's arrival came on the 15th anniversary of crewmate Peggy Whitson's first launch to the space station and said SpaceX had reached a new milestone by re-launching a previously flown cargo ship.

"The last time we had a return visitor to the ISS was STS-135 (the final shuttle flight) in July of 2011," he said. "We have a new generation of vehicles now, led by commercial partners like SpaceX, as they build the infrastructure that will carry us into the future of exploration."

With the Dragon secured, flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston took over arm operations, remotely pulling the Dragon in for berthing at the Earth-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module. Once precisely aligned, 16 motorized bolts in the common berthing mechanism drove home to lock the capsule in place.

Launched Saturday from the Kennedy Space Center, the Dragon is loaded with 3 tons of crew supplies, station hardware and science gear. The spacecraft's pressurized compartment, the section accessible to the station's crew, is packed with some 3,700 pounds of equipment and supplies, much of it devoted to medical and biological research.

The Dragon over the Red Sea.

NASA

Three payloads are mounted in the Dragon's unpressurized trunk section: an experimental roll-out solar array, a commercial platform that can support up to four Earth-observation instruments at a time and a suite of telescopes to study neutron stars. All three will be extracted later by the station's robot arm.

The station crew will unload the cargo ship in the days ahead and then repack it with 3,400 pounds of biological samples, no longer needed equipment and failed components being returned to Earth for engineering analysis.

Fischer and Whitson plan to unberth and release the Dragon July 2, setting up a fiery plunge to Earth and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles.

This is the 11th station resupply flight carried out by SpaceX under contract to NASA. The company plans two more cargo runs this year, one scheduled for launch Aug. 1 and the other on Nov. 1.

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SpaceX supply ship reaches space station - CBS News

An experiment thatarrived at the International Space Station today (June 5) will test a celestial navigational system that one day may guide future spaceships to Jupiter as efficiently as GPS satellites get you to Starbucks.

The Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) experiment is among the projects planned for the world's first telescope dedicated to observing neutron stars, the densest known objects in the universe.

Neutron stars form when a star roughly one to three times the mass of the sun runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion and collapses, crushing every proton and electron in its core. The result is a ball of neutrons about 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) across roughly the size of a city that contains as much mass as the sun. [New ISS Experiment Will Probe Neutron Stars (Video)]

A teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh about 1 billion tons (0.9 metric tons) here on Earth as much as a mountain, according to NASA.

Artist's concept of a pulsar (blue-white disk in center) pulling in matter from a nearby star (red disk at upper right). The stellar material forms a disk around the pulsar (multicolored ring) before falling onto the surface at the magnetic poles. The pulsar's intense magnetic field is represented by faint blue outlines surrounding the pulsar.

Stars larger than three solar masses collapse into a black hole, which are objects so dense with matter that not even light can escape their gravitational fists.

Unlike black holes, neutron stars radiate energy across a broad range of frequencies, but they are most visible in their X-ray beams, which will be the focus of the station's newly arrived Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) observatory.

NICER, which will be robotically mounted to the outside of the station, contains 56 X-ray mirrors to illuminate the structure and inner workings of neutron stars. Of particular interest are pulsars, which are fast-spinning neutron stars with especially luminous magnetic fields.

An artist's illustration of the Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, on the International Space Station.

Pulsars emit powerful beams in opposite directions as they spin. These beams are observable only when they're pointed toward Earth, making it seem as if these objects pulse (hence the name). In some cases, this apparent pulsing occurs with the predictability and consistency of an atomic clock.

The fastest pulsars spin hundreds of times per second faster than the blades of a household blender, said physicist Zaven Arzoumanian, lead researcher with the NICER project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"The fact that we have these pulsars apparently flashing away in the sky makes them interesting as tools," Arzoumanian said.

"You can imagine having a system of clocks, very accurate clocks, distributed all over the sky," he said. "In the same way that we use atomic clocks on GPS satellites to navigate our cars and ourselves on the surface of the Earth, we can use these clock signals from the sky, from pulsars, to navigate spacecraft anywhere in the solar system."

The idea of navigating via pulsar is not new, but the technology to autonomously detect and time the flashes is a recent development. Once it's attached to the station, the NICER telescope and SEXTANT software will run for an initial 18-month demonstration mission.

The telescope is among nearly 3 tons (2.7 metric tons) of supplies and experiments aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship that blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday (June 3) and arrived this morning.

Irene Klotz can be reached on Twitter at @free_space. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Pulsar-Based Navigation System to Get Test on Space Station - Space.com

The Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo ship S.S. John Glenn pulls away from the International Space Station on June 4, 2017 in this view from a NASA camera on the station exterior.

The last few days have been non-stop action for astronauts on the International Space Station, and there's still more work on the way.

Today (June 2), NASA astronauts Jack Fischer and Peggy Whitsonbid farewell to a robotic Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo ship, an event that came amid four days of spaceship landings, launches, departures and arrivals.

"It's a remarkable time at the international space station. One of the busiest times of vehicle traffic in history," NASA spokesman Rob Navias said today as Fischer and Whitson worked to release the Cygnus cargo ship.

It all began on Friday (June 1), when two space station crewmembersreturned to Earth on a Soyuz space capsule. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency landed in the remote steppes of Kazakhstan to end a six-month mission to the International Space Station. Their return left Whitson, Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin behind on the station.

One day later, on Saturday (June 2), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketlaunched a Dragon cargo ship packed with 6,000 lbs. (2,721 kilograms) of fresh supplies toward the space station. That launch marked a major milestone for SpaceX: It's the first time the company reused a Dragon capsule (it first flew in 2014).

Then came today's Cygnus departure. The Orbital ATK cargo shiplaunched to the space station in mid-April to deliver 7,600 lbs. (3,500 kilograms) of supplies. It will be intentionally disposed of by burning up in Earth's atmosphere on June 11.

"This is the first time in history that two U.S. commercial cargo vehicles will be in free flight at the same time," Navias said.

But we're not done yet.

On Monday (June 5), the Dragon spacecraft that launched Saturday will arrive at the space station. Whitson and Fischer will use the station's robotic arm to capture the Dragon capsule and attach it to a berthing port so the craft can be unpacked.

According to Navias, the space station crew will get a bit of a breather after the Dragon arrival. But in 10 days, they'll see another arrival: an uncrewedRussian Progress cargo ship packed with still more supplies, he added.

Then on July 28, a new crew is scheduled to launch to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. So, whew! There's still more space action to come this summer!

Editor's Note: This article has been corrected to reflect thatNASA astronaut Jack Fischer remains on the space station, not French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him@tariqjmalikandGoogle+.Follow us@Spacedotcom,FacebookandGoogle+. Original article onSpace.com.

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It's a Super-Busy Time at the International Space Station Right Now - Space.com

SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Florida. (NASA TV)

SpaceX took one more step in its campaign for rocket reusability today by sending a previously flown Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station for the first time.

If all goes well, it shouldmark the first space station rendezvous for a reused spaceship since the retirement of NASAs space shuttle fleet in 2011.

SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at5:07 p.m. ET (2:07 p.m. PT) from Launch Complex 39A at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida.An earlier countdown on Thursday had to be called off when a lightning storm struck too close to the launch pad.

It was the 100th launch from Pad 39A, which has been the starting point for space journeys going back to the Apollo moon shots.

Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceXs vice president of mission assurance, said that he was super-happy, as always, after a good launch and that it felt great to be a part of Pad 39As 100th launch.

The robotic Dragon capsule is loaded up with nearly 6,000 pounds of experiments and supplies for the station and its crew.

Among the payloads are carriers packed with 40 mice for in-orbit experiments aimed at testing therapies for bone loss, which is a serious problem for long-term space travelers. Twenty of the mice will be returned to Earth on a future Dragon flight for extended study.

Theres also a fruit fly experiment aimed at studying heart function, which is another health concern for astronauts. Other experiments focus on protein crystal growth and plant growth in zero-G.

The Dragons unpressurized trunk is carrying an experimental set of roll-out solar arrays, a precision pointing platform for Earth observation and an experiment that will be mounted to the stations exterior to study neutron stars.

SpaceXs billionaire founder, Elon Musk, has long sought to develop reusable spacecraft as part of his strategy to reduce the cost of access to space and this mission marks another advance for the quest.

Over the past year and a half, SpaceX has gotten the knack of having its Falcon 9 first-stage boosters fly themselves back for landings and recoveries. Today, the booster toucheddown at SpaceXs Landing Zone 1 in Florida, not far from the launch pad, with a fusillade of sonic booms heralding its arrival.

The Dragon capsule launched today for the CRS-11 mission previously flew on the CRS-4 space station resupply mission in 2014. After its splashdown, the Dragonwas inspected and refurbished for reuse, with components replaced as necessary.

This is the first time when we fly actually the hull, the structure of Dragon and the majority of components again, SpaceXs Koenigsmann said in a pre-launch NASA interview. That lines up well with our quest of reusability and overall, in the long term, lowering the costof access to space.

Koenigsmann said its a pretty big deal.

The space shuttle orbiter was also reusable, but theres a big difference in the cost: By some estimates, each shuttle flight costas much as $1 billion.The price tag for each SpaceX Dragon resupply flight isin the neighborhood of $133 million, based on the terms of the companys contract with NASA.

The Dragon is due to rendezvous with the station on Monday. To make room, a robotic Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo craft, filled with trash, will be unhooked from the station on Sunday for disposal.

When Dragon shows up, astronauts will use the stations robotic arm to pull itin for its berthing.Over the course of the following several weeks, theyll unload the cargo, load it back up with payloads destined to be sent to Earth, and then prepare it for its descentto a Pacific Ocean splashdown.

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